Worst thing you’ll see all week: Sl8n8

In this Dutch horror movie, a bunch of twenty-something teenagers with a Ouiji board party in a haunted Belgian mine. You know where this is going, so there’s really no need to watch it play out by actually seeing the movie. In the US, this movie is known as Slaughter Night because we rightly read Sl8n8 as “Slate Nate”, which isn’t the least bit scary and actually makes me think of Avril Lavigne’s song, Sk8ter Boi.

The most disappointing thing about this forgettable demonic possession/slasher movie is that it doesn’t have the slightest shred of identity that isn’t slavishly borrowed from crappy American horror movies. This is usually what happens when you pick through foreign horror films. You end up watching something that just apes American movies or, if you’re lucky, Japanese movies. But sometimes you’ll find something with a sense of national identity. In recent years, I’ve had the pleasure to discover Sauna from Finland, Let the Right One In from Sweden, The Backwoods from Spain, Isolation from Ireland, and Trollhunter from Norway, all with a distinct sense of national character in the story, the actors, the locations, and the situation. No such thing happens in Slate Nate.

However, I did learn a little Dutch. The Dutch word for “fucking loser” is “fucking loser” and the Dutch word for “fucking hell” is “fucking hell”. Also, when surprised by the obligatory corpse falling out of a closet, one of the twenty-something teenagers yells out, “Jesus!” According to the subtitles, this is Dutch for “Christ!”